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“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... There were​ high hopes for the son of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, the grandson of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but the boy told his mother that all he wanted was a quiet life and a sailing boat. She wasn’t wholly disappointed at his failure to distinguish himself ...”

“... possibly deceive any one.’ It’s not clear whether Mr Gully’s Frankenstein was called after Mary Shelley’s novel, its over-reaching protagonist, or his monstrous creation. By the early 1830s, the tendency to confuse Frankenstein and his creature was already well established. Letters to the Times on the 1832 Reform Bill used ‘Frankenstein’ and ...”

“... Henry James in the Preface to The Aspern Papers, the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with Shelley and Byron. There has been a flurry of activity ...”

“... since shortly after the work’s first appearance in 1818, without necessarily reading a line of Mary Shelley’s prose. More than a century before it was filmed, it existed in two rival stage versions. Cartoonists drew it, writers and politicians alluded to it. The plot, rather like the monster, got away from its creator and walked the world. It’s ...”

“... remarked a French gentleman travelling through Savoy in 1823 in the same carriage as Mary Shelley and observing her as she checked her small son Percy’s self-willed behaviour. She was pleased enough to report the compliment to Leigh and Marianne Hunt in a letter; and if she seems a little arch in liking compliments, she strikes the reader ...”

“... in Italy. He had left Pisa, where he had heard that his daughter Allegra had died, where Shelley had died, and where the English chaplain had ‘done him the honour’ of preaching against him. He set up house in the Casa Saluzzo ‘at Albaro on a hill overlooking Genoa, cold – frosty but airy, – only one chimney in the whole house, which is ...”

“... is to see the same double bind in force against a writer as indifferent to worldly prudence as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her vindications of the Rights of Men and the Rights of Woman, books of great originality and psychological acuteness, are as widely discussed as ever, and yet, to judge by the number of editions and reprints, they have been demoted to second ...”

“... not, as he was in this book’s 1973 precursor, Billion Year Spree, a trifle over-persuaded by Mary Shelley? There is of course much to be said for seeing Frankenstein as simultaneously a Gothic novel and a work of Science Fiction, and Aldiss says it well. Mary Shelley had the right scientific background; the ...”

“... village of Lerici and the even smaller hamlet of San Terenzo. ‘The sea came up to the door,’ Mary Shelley later wrote. ‘A steep hill sheltered it behind.’ As well as Mary, her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and ...”

“... fine book, but I wish Mr Keach had supplied a more explicit context for it. Apart from saying that Shelley’s language hasn’t been adequately described, he relies on the reader to know how the critical debate stands. He assumes too much, so I’ll mention some of the matters he takes for granted. The case against ...”

“... fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once seen Shelley plain, and Byron, too, and who had looked on both their corpses. But on Crane’s account, almost the whole of his long life was disappointing, and disappointed: its brilliant or crucial moments were intense but brief. For some months, from January ...”

“... needing the decisive experience of a first-hand witness, he soon becomes absorbed in the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Once again he follows literally and imaginatively where the biographical materials lead, discovering ‘a wholly different world-view of what a revolution required of its participants’. In particular he moves away from a boyish urge for ...”

“... a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many ...”

“... Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his child? From the journals, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking and published in 1986, it seems clear that she was in love with Shelley at the age of ...”